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14
But the fledgling art connoisseur was not to be put off. Until now he had been in regard to the studio, the people in it, and the paintings, the soaring, silent hawk. This, however, was his instant of darting and seizing. He had carried ‘Noon’ off with him, under his arm, unwrapped, and made the boat without a second to lose. And amazingly soon thereafter Gregory Clare and his daughter had got themselves to Europe, which meant Paris; and once in Paris, Gregory swept Ariel straight to the Louvre, where she sat or promenaded with him as long as Hugh’s thousand dollars lasted, gazing on cold, dim old pictures, but with her father’s warm, 대전오피 vibrant artist’s hand often on hers. It had been Ariel’s one adventure beyond Bermuda, until this present adventure: alone, and her father dead.

Hugh had never come back to Bermuda and his letters were infrequent. Gregory Clare’s own letters were, from the beginning, almost non-existent, because that was his casual way with friends. One of Hugh’s first letters told them of the sudden death of his father, and that Hugh’s plan for making himself a lawyer was frustrated by the necessity of getting as quickly as was possible into his father’s niche in the business world. But Hugh did not use the term “frustration,” and there was, indeed, no touch of bitterness in the communication. The hint of a real grief was there, and a suggestion, somehow, that his father could not have been so exceptional in business capacity as in personality and character, since at the time of his death he had pretty well gone through his inheritance and was leaving his family little but a name. The name, however, was not clouded by his purely financial inability and was now of invaluable assistance to Hugh, who was being quite spoiled—according to his own account—by Wall Street associates of his father who had taken him into a big bond house on a floor several stories removed from the bottom.